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Sentence Assignment

I have to write about the following sentence for four minutes. I get one of these a week. I am four weeks behind at this point. This should take me twenty minutes to do. I should be able to beat Midnight if I am swift enough.

“There wasn’t one to give.”

A fuck. A duck. A dollar. An excuse. A good reason, even. A moment. A picture. One last song. A story. Tell me about a good day recently. Something that made you smile. Maybe you saw something funny in traffic. There’s always interesting people driving cars and doing other shit at the same time. The assholes that have the bluetooth headsets that seem like they’re talking to themselves. The women putting on makeup in the fucking merge lane. I love the people who sing and drum on their steering wheels. What about the people singing sad songs? I like them, too. Heads slightly tilted forward, mouth not quite opening all the way. Some of them seem to be humming.

I used to listen to more music on the way to work. In Oregon, I drove over a valley and some mornings, there was fog down there, made by the river, which was warmer than the cool spring air. There used to be trees. There used to be bus rides. There used to be a whole country to give my speed to.

Now I feel I don’t have a minute to give, to lose, to make things, to sing a song in the car.

Yeah man, this is definitely my favourite of the bunch – it seems a bit more focused, and I’m really diggin’ the bittersweetness of it. Good on ya for getting caught up by slogging through all four in a row. It’s good to see you writing.